| dc.description.abstract | During the 1950s, the British colonial administration
in Kenya introduced fundamental and wide ranging
land tenure reforms in those areas of the country which
were inhabited by traditional African societies.
African customary land tenure rights were to be replaced
with registered individual titles to land as a
result of these reforms. The official arguments tor
reform were ones of development and stressed the need
to modernize farming in the African areas of the
country. Colonial officials argued that African
customary land tenure relations constituted the main
constraint on development in the African areas and that
their replacement with registered individual ownership
of land was a pre-condition to any development
initiatives in t.hese areas. When Kenya became
politically independent in 1963, the post-colonial
African government continued implementing the
as part of its rural development strategy so that today
most land in the country has been converted from
customary to registered individual ownership.
The thesis inquires in greater detail into the:
arguments which were advance d to justify the
introduction of the reforms and evaluates t.he socioeconomic
impact they have had since their introduction.
It finds that, contrary to official arguments, the
introduction of the reforms in the 1950s was motivated
equally by political considerations as economic ones.
Land tenure reform was supposed to be used by the
colonial government as a counter-insurgency weapon in
the fight against radical African nationalism and to
ensure the continuity of the colonial economy into the
post-colonial era by promoting the more prosperous but
politically conservative elements within
society. Secondly, the economic underdevelopment of
the African areas observed by exponents of the r e f o r ms
in the 1950s was more the product of repressive
colonial eonomic and land policies than a bad system
of land tenure of itself. | en |
